the original melody of the derided "Liv- ery Stable Blues," no composition by a black composer was played at Aeolian Hall that illustrious day; in accord with the standards of the times, no black mu- sician performed. Nor-as has often been pointed out-has any black com- poser ever earned the fame or fortune that Gershwin did by "improving" the hard-won art of the plantation songs. In the decades after the "Rhapsody," the questions only intensified in the light of developments in both music and society: How had a popular tunesmith com- posed our best-known achievements in classical forms? How had a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants come to represent the Mrican-American voice? (Implicit in both: how had he dared?) Aided by some judicious supplemen- tation, the "Gershwin Reader" presents a portrait of the artist who, by writing some of the most fearless and beloved music of the American centu.f)r, stood like a lightning rod in the storms of an emerging democratic culture. " D idn't you play anything when you were a boy?" the reporter asked. To which the composer replied, not without pride, "Only hoo " Gershwin credited his unlikely achievement to "the combination of New York, where I was born, and the rising, exhilarating rhythm of it, with centuries of heredi- tary feeling back of me." His father, Morris Gershovitz, was a dubious pa- triarch. He had arrived from St. Peters- burg in the eighteen-nineties, and- dazzled by the possibilities-had gone into a new business nearly every year: la- dies' shoes, Turkish baths, a pool hall, even a bookmaking venture at Brighton Beach Race Track. He had simplified his name and married his Russian sweet- heart, Rose Bruskin, whose restless ambition more than matched his own. The four Gershwin children-Ira, born in 1896, who everyone quickly forgot was actually named Israel; George, born (but never called) Jacob, in 1898; fu- thur, in 1900; and the only girl, Frances, in 1906-grew up in nearly thirty dif- ferent apartments, from Harlem to Coney Island, but mostly in the thriving ghetto around Grand Street. This was not a family tied to tradition. Morris's grand- father had been a rabbi, but Ira was the only one of the three sons to be given a bar mitzvah, and this event appears to have been motivated more by Rose's de- sire to impress her friends with a party at Zeitlan's restaurant, the local kosher Versailles, than by any residual religious feeling. By the time George came of age, it was clear that his only religion was mUSIC. He had been saved by the piano. On a fateM day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the fam- ily's Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street-fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular tune like a vaude- ville virtuoso. He had never studied a note. Many years later, Gershwin re- called the musical epiphanies of his early childhood: sitting transfixed outside a penny arcade as an automatic piano emit- ted noises that turned out to be Rubin- stein's "Melody in F"; feeling a "flashing revelation of beauty" when the strains of Dvofák's "Humoresque" reached him from the school auditorium while he was, in fact, outside playing hoo But now a piano had flown in through his window like an angel on a mission- which is as good a way as any of ex- plaining how he could play: "Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad one," he informed an interviewer in 1924. "I was a changed person after I took it up." P'é- SS \M \ s-r: ,\ H A \.-f e.JI\ pí'l'1 OP1{N\\ <)T: " HA \- t= F Ù \.- ' Op,oM. -rR \ S\: ,\ H l-r þ... 0LASS Oý v-J A.. -re.R ' / ,..... ..... ..'O<C... c- . =::> ð ? . () . t:>c - 00 ... 6 "" w o o o <) . . (! c:::: ,. ' " , . : ',}: .--' . . (0-- "Jo :....;::0;.-.:.:,.. .....-- , ....x .:.:.: -=<<:_:5::: :5; .:;:;.g:::-:.:.:,;.:. ? ..r" ." .". His songs poured out of his playing; he said that the tunes came "dripping off" his fingers, although after the piano arrived he studied seriouslJDebussy; Liszt, Chopin-for about four years. The word "genius" occurs for the first time in a letter from a teacher who wrote of trying to keep the boy away from jazz. But Gershwin was never much of a for- mal student. He quit high school at fif- teen to become the youngest "piano pounder" in Tin Pan Alley; and the rest of his education was left to what he called "intensive listening": in the concert halls (he favored Russian composers, like himself), at Broadway revues, in the Yiddish theatres, and, increasingly; in the clubs of Harlem. By 1916, the great black jazz pianists James Johnson and Luckey Roberts were telling Eubie Blake about "this very talented ofay piano player" who could perform their most difficult tricks. The point is not that Gershwin was crossing boundaries but that he didn't recognize that there were any boundaries to cross. He began imagining "big composi- tions" while he was still in his teens and his first published songs were being in- terpolated into the higgledy-piggledy formats of current Broadway shows. In 1922, just two years after AI J olson made a sensation of Gershwin's "Swanee"- performed in his customary blackface- Gershwin composed an ambitious one- act "jazz operà' titled "Blue Monday;" which was billed as "a colored trag- edy enacted in operatic style." Produced among the skits and high-kicking num- bers of the "Scandals" that year, it earned the New York Wórld's verdict as "the most dismal, stupid, and incredible black- face sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated" and was yanked after a sin- gle performance. Undaunted, Gershwin maintained his optimistic faith in what he called a "transitory stage" of history; when everyone was awaiting a work that would fuse the nation's disparate musical styles and transcend them all: an Amer- ican work in the image of America. There was a tension about the age, he wrote, that could not last. " R hapsody in Blue" gave people ev- erything they had been waiting for. Novelty with depth; virtuosity with pas- sion; originality with a tradition strong behind it-their own too nervous, much